Development of a Polymer Extrusion System to Manufacture Recycled Bioplastic Composites for Additive Manufacturing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The research validates the use of recycled end-of-life wind turbine blade fiberglass to improve the mechanical strength of a thermoplastic in collaboration with McGill University. The critical fiber length glass fibers from wind turbine blades are reclaimed through a mechanical grinding process, incorporated with polylactic acid (PLA) in a twin-screw extruder to produce composite pellets and manufactured into filament via a single-screw extrusion system. This filament is used as feedstock for standard fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printers to manufacture ASTM standard tensile specimens: D638-14. Reinforced thermoplastic filaments with varying fiber content ranging from 3%-10% are manufactured using this process. It was found that the long fiber reinforced PLA provided a 20% increase in tensile strength and a 28% increase in the stiffness compared to the pure PLA specimens. The increased strength and stiffness can allow the material to be used in smaller quantities when replacing a given thermoplastic material. This material could be beneficial for both rapid prototyping and application-specific products. In addition to the issues faced with the waste management of wind turbines, so too is the textile waste caused by the improper disposal of clothing. To address the issues faced with improper disposal of clothing, a material characterization method for analyzing the draping behaviour of flexible 3D printed textiles was initiated. Pairing an extrusion system with 3D printing allows for the most rapid development of both a specialized material and engineering solution. Looking to the future of the textile industry, it is crucial that sustainable recycling and manufacturing processes are used to create a better future for the generations to come. Keywords: Sustainability, Recycling, The Wind Energy Industry, Wind Turbine Blades, Lifecycle Analysis, Circular Economy, 3D Printing, Additive Manufacturing, Bioplastic, Polylactic Acid, Extrusion, Single-Screw Extruder, Fiber Reinforced Filaments, ASTM D638 Coupons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".